franpa wrote:I appreciate any efforts towards enabling the ability to enforce Nearest Neighbour upscaling in old & new games (especially old games). I also do not care about perfect doubling of resolutions and am okay with fractional upscaling that can result in pixel doubling oddities.

WIP36 added this feature. You need to use the new plain text .conf file to enable it.

Can it nearest neighbour upscale to an integer value beyond the monitors resolution and then downscale it with whatever filtering it wants, to reduce artifacts from potential fractional downscaling?

Not at present. A shader is a simpler trick for softening non-integer nearest neighbor artifacting. RetroArch has one called "Pixellate" (it's since been renamed to something else I can't remember--it's under the 'Retro' section of shaders in the RetroArch library). It blends only the misproportioned lines. Given only a few horizontal lines here and there are affected, the image looks just as sharp as pure nearest neighbor to most eyes. This obviously requires robust shader support.

Personally, I am content with black all around the active integer-locked image. Then again, I use a 32" for a PC display from 2 feet back and a 40" for HTPC from 4-5 feet back--I can afford a slightly diminished screenspace.

But why does the behavior differ between DGVoodoo2 and DGVoodoo1? DGVoodoo1 looks much nicer. Zeckensack's and DGVoodoo1 appear to have very similar output.

Indeed, old one looks nicer. I decided to resolve this problem by adding the possibility of dithering as a post process effect to dgVoodoo and set the default rendering quality to true 32bit.So, by default everything would render nice but if one wanted some retro feel and look then dithering could be switched on.In fact it all is working now, except one mysterious case in Glide which I'm struggling with.

Dege wrote:Indeed, old one looks nicer. I decided to resolve this problem by adding the possibility of dithering as a post process effect to dgVoodoo and set the default rendering quality to true 32bit.So, by default everything would render nice but if one wanted some retro feel and look then dithering could be switched on.In fact it all is working now, except one mysterious case in Glide which I'm struggling with.

Can dithering help fix/improve the way light color is displayed in SCPT ?

A reboot of my PC seems to have fixed Command & Conquer's inability to function (it originally failed to detect that I have a Mouse). I've run in to new issues though.

1) Without your mod the game runs 4:3 (good), Firestorm has the issue I previously mentioned (menus not rendering etc.) but the gameplay is bugged. The music can be heard playing without issue but the gameplay field is blank and the game is unresponsive to inputs (I can see the sidebar and minimap). I can open the chat interface but I can't close it, I can see the flashing underscore for it persistently flash though. I had to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and use Task Manager to close the game.

Basically the game is just fucked >.> which is sad because I wanna play it!

2) With your mod & default configuration the game renders the graphics stretched to 16:9 and the menus seem to be offset from where they're visually positioned, like I have to position the mouse in the top left corner of the display to interact with the menu list that is present at the center of the screen. Firestorm menus render correctly but their also offset from the graphics. When entering gameplay the games custom Exception Handler immediately kicks in and says the game has encountered an error and can't continue to operate.

Okay, after another reboot of the computer the game now works, I can get in to gameplay and actually play the game (without your mod) without it crashing or freezing (I have no clue why system reboots are making the game work better). Your mod still triggers the games custom Exception Handler shortly after gameplay begins.

With your mod the your mod configured to stretched_ar for screen scaling, I am able to determine that there are 2 mouse coursers while the game is running. The Windows mouse courser and the games mouse courser. The games mouse courser only moves while the Windows mouse courser is in the top left quadrant of the display and you need to line the games mouse courser up with the menu items to interact with them.

Clicking "New Game' will change the mouse behaviour for the worst, the in-game mouse courser will no longer have its position updated as I move the Windows mouse courser. Instead I have to click to have the in-game mouse courser update and I have to guess where on the screen to click to make the in-game courser appear where I want it to.

The menu for choosing whether to play the Base Game or the Expansion, the Main Menu, and the sub-menu when clicking a menu option like "New Game" all react to Windows mouse courser movement across different sections of the display, so the offset is changing depending on what menu you're interacting with.

https://youtu.be/4CraExzzbr8 DgVoodo is not used in this video. (It looks like the menu UI rendering issue in Firestorm also applies to the base game UI, maybe Micorosoft buggered something up which made the problem worse or EA buggered it up when porting the game to Origin. You can see the mouse courser behaves correctly.

Dege wrote:Indeed, old one looks nicer. I decided to resolve this problem by adding the possibility of dithering as a post process effect to dgVoodoo and set the default rendering quality to true 32bit.So, by default everything would render nice but if one wanted some retro feel and look then dithering could be switched on.In fact it all is working now, except one mysterious case in Glide which I'm struggling with.

i tried my best to "wing it", but all i get is "F1 2000 has stopped working" .......

while i appreciate your sarcasm, hopefully someone else might offer more constructive help, as i tried all that after reading the readme, before asking for help ... hoping there was a more exact / bare bones setup guide, possibly built by a community member

I don't see why he should be thankful to you when you mocked him and didn't help him. That readme doesn't clearly explain what to initially do with the files. It just assumes that the user already knows. His request for help is most understandable. He's not the first person who's had to ask and whom I've had to help.

MS7XWDC, here are the 3 simple steps that you asked for:1. Copy dgVoodooCpl.exe to your game folder.2. If the game uses DirectX, copy the contents of the MS folder to your game folder, as well. If the game uses Glide, copy the contents of the 3Dfx folder, instead.3. Run dgVoodooCpl.exe from the game folder to configure options.

Dege, may I suggest adding something like this to the top of the Usage section in the Readme? That would make it a lot easier for people (both new users and those of us who end up having to help them). I understand that there are some alternatives and wrinkles (like copying certain files to system folders and not always needing D3D8.dll), but you can explain those in the following paragraphs. It's better to give the simplest instructions that are what 95% of users are interested in up front and then run through the details that the other 5% might be interested in than to not have any simple instructions at all.

I never asked for anyone to be thankful he thanked me. I just gave him welcome in advance but that would require you to read the post.....

The documentation assumes nothing except for the fact that someone will read it (in english) and understand it.

Is it in a step by step fashion for installation? No.

Could it be? Sure.

Is the information required to to use Dgvoodoo in the documentation if a person bothers to read the documentation? Yes.

The documentation exists on the dgvoodoo 2 website and inside the 2.54 install for those that can take a few seconds to visit a web page or open a zip file and read it.

Although the WIP could probably include the 2.54 documentation or up to minute changes in documentation for every single WIP change you can probably understand why that isn't done so since like most sane people constantly changing documentation is not fun.

It's likely that if reading documentation and/or figuring out how to use a wrapper is too much trouble then usage of wrappers is not for you.

FROM THE README"There is no installer for dgVoodoo beacuse you can copy its dlls anywhere you want (to use). If u like it and want to use as the only global Glide wrapper on your machine then copy Glide dlls to the system folder."

It doesn't matter really if you put the files in system32 or syswow64. All that really matters is that the files are in an accessible PATH variable or in the game directory.

copy dx dll to a game folder

FROM THE README"For DirectX emulation only a local installation is possible since the DirectX dlls CANNOT be copied to the system folder (see DirectX readme)."

download compilers and copy to [2] folders

FROM THE README"If you use dgVoodoo on Windows 10 then dynamic shader compiling is automatically available because D3DCompiler_47 is part of the operating system.For preceding Windows versions (Vista, 7, you need to download it manually and then, you can copy this dll into each game folder next to the wrapper dlls but the best practice is to copy it into Windows\System32 folder for 32 bit operating systemsWindows\SysWOW64 folder for 64 bit operating systemsif it is not already there by the result of the installation of some other software.Note that dgVoodoo supports both D3DCompiler_43 and D3DCompiler_47. _43 is supported only because of compatibility with users having it downloaded and copied into their system folder previously."

DosFreak wrote:I never asked for anyone to be thankful he thanked me. I just gave him welcome in advance but that would require you to read the post.....

*cough* "You're welcome in advance" assumes thanks is incoming, much like "thanks in advance" assumes thank-worthy help is incoming. Simply "you're welcome" would have been proper given you had already been thanked in advance. Adding the "in advance" in reply to a "thanks in advance" can come off as mockery when in fact the gratuitous "in advance" was, in this case, a simple logic error.

Personally, I would always avoid "you're welcome in advance," even in the proper context as it suggests you know your contribution is going to be helpful. Even with the right intentions, this is often enough not the case that it's best to err on the side of humility.

I don't see why he should be thankful to you when you mocked him and didn't help him. That readme doesn't clearly explain what to initially do with the files. It just assumes that the user already knows. His request for help is most understandable. He's not the first person who's had to ask and whom I've had to help.

MS7XWDC, here are the 3 simple steps that you asked for:1. Copy dgVoodooCpl.exe to your game folder.2. If the game uses DirectX, copy the contents of the MS folder to your game folder, as well. If the game uses Glide, copy the contents of the 3Dfx folder, instead.3. Run dgVoodooCpl.exe from the game folder to configure options.

Dege, may I suggest adding something like this to the top of the Usage section in the Readme? That would make it a lot easier for people (both new users and those of us who end up having to help them). I understand that there are some alternatives and wrinkles (like copying certain files to system folders and not always needing D3D8.dll), but you can explain those in the following paragraphs. It's better to give the simplest instructions that are what 95% of users are interested in up front and then run through the details that the other 5% might be interested in than to not have any simple instructions at all.

and that's all i asked for, a simple step by step, after reading the readme and trying for hours as best i could. i worked on this series with James Hawkins & am in the credits for '02 & F1C '99-'02, so im no dope. i tried my best, and have zero idea why you assumed i didn't see or read the readme.

DosFreak wrote:I never asked for anyone to be thankful he thanked me. I just gave him welcome in advance but that would require you to read the post.....

I wasn't being serious because you weren't in saying it.

DosFreak wrote:It's likely that if reading documentation and/or figuring out how to use a wrapper is too much trouble then usage of wrappers is not for you.

That's an elitist attitude. There's no reason why someone who has never used a wrapper before couldn't learn. When you're new to something, complex, wordy instructions can be overwhelming. Simple instructions can be very important to get a person started. It can be easy to forget that when it's been a long time since you were in their shoes.